“It’s harmony,” he explained.
“Oh.”
He pulled her to her feet, laughing, then found himself close to crying. “Come on,” he said. “One last dance.”
BETH SLEPT LATE SATURDAY, AND IVY TOOK HER TIME that afternoon, strolling and talking with her, making sure she was all right before driving her home to her parents. Later, after changing into “Gemma the art student,” Ivy headed to Providence with Tristan. Finding a dark limo parked outside Corinne’s home and figuring it was Tynan’s company car, they circled the block every fifteen minutes, hoping he would leave. At eight o’clock, they got lucky. When they knocked on the door, Gran answered and said she was alone.
She was surprised to see them again so soon—and too smart to think that this was just a pleasant visit. They had sat down in the kitchen for five minutes, making small talk as she poured coffee and tea into her colorful mugs and opened a tin of lemon bars, when she said suddenly, “Oh, stop the bull. You’ve learned something. Out with it.”
Ivy and Tristan exchanged glances.
“We found an article online which mentioned a gold cufflink with an arrow on it,” Tristan said.
Ivy pulled from her purse a printed copy of the article.
Gran read it, and after a long delay looked up. “I told Corinne when she was just a little whip of a thing she’d better learn to play fair or she wouldn’t have no friends. And I told her when she was older if she wasn’t going to play fair, then she’d better play smart.” The old woman shook her head. “Didn’t listen.”
“Gran, we’d like to take the cufflink to the police,” Tristan said.
The old woman closed her eyes.
“Please.”
She got up and walked around the kitchen. “So where’d she get the cufflink?” Gran asked. “How’d she hear about the hit-and-run? It happened in Massachusetts.”
“I don’t know,” Ivy answered. “Maybe just luck. Maybe the person took his or her car to Tony’s when she was photographing the place.”
“You think this is going to get you off the hook, Luke?” Gran asked. “People believe what they want to believe.”
“It’s my only chance.”
Gran sat down again, thinking. Tristan nibbled a lemon bar and Ivy sipped her tea, waiting.
“So,” Gran said at last, “we’d better search her room and see if we can find something more to give the police, a photograph of the car or a note.”
They searched for the next two and a half hours, going through every drawer, every shirt and pants pocket, every single piece of paper as well as boxes of photographic prints that Gran brought from her own room, finding nothing that seemed related to a hit-and-run accident. At Gran’s suggestion, they pulled the drawers all the way out of the bureaus and desk to look behind them, lifted the rug and stripped the bed, checking the mattress and box spring. They discovered nothing. Ivy remade the bed, turning down the spread as it had been before. Gran gazed down at it, then leaned over and pulled the spread back over the pillow, smoothing it gently with her hand. Corinne’s death had become real and final to the old woman.
Without speaking, Gran turned out the lights in the room and waited for them to follow her out. She closed the door behind them. Handing Tristan the cufflink, she said, “I’ll vouch that Corinne left this the night she died, and that I gave it to you tonight, but I fear for you, Luke. Gemma should take it to the police. You should stay hidden until they have a killer in custody. Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening,” Tristan said, and handed Ivy the cufflink.
Gran walked them to the front door. Tristan hugged her good-bye.
“Thank you,” Ivy called back softly through the screen door. She wasn’t sure Gran heard her.
“It’s as senseless as her dying,” Gran said, gazing beyond Ivy, “an old woman like me living this long.”
Ivy and Tristan didn’t speak until they were beyond River Gardens. “I—I didn’t know what to say back to her.”
Tristan nodded. “Anything comforting would have seemed like a lie.”
Beyond Providence, on the long stretch of road that dropped down to New Bedford, then hugged the coast, traffic grew light. Ivy checked her rearview mirror and saw only two sets of headlights a distance behind her. Few people were driving to the Cape at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night.
She drove in silence, reviewing everything they had discovered in the last several days. At last she said, “I wish we could have found a photograph of a car with front damage. With all those that Corinne took for her photo essay, there wasn’t a single one there, which tells me someone had a reason to scoop them up.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. One incriminating photo could be sent to a million places on the Internet, which means the person who is being blackmailed could never be sure he or she had gotten rid of all the electronic copies. And maybe, with software like Photoshop, a picture alone isn’t considered evidence. But a matching cufflink would be, especially a custom-made one, especially if the person who found it was still alive to testify where and when she found it.”
“Which is why Corinne is not.”
“Looks that way,” Tristan agreed. “Let me see it again.”
Ivy reached in her pocket. Tristan turned on the cabin light and studied the cufflink. Ivy blinked as a car passed them, its headlights catching in her side mirror, momentarily blinding her.
“This is a rounded kind of arrow,” Tristan observed, “not straight like a graphic symbol. It sure looks custom made.”
Ivy glanced in the rearview mirror. Just one set of headlights followed her now, the same set that tailed her when getting on the highway, she thought, then laughed at herself. How could she possibly tell in the dark?
“I think our only choice is to turn the cufflink over to the police as soon as possible,” Tristan went on. “I’m a little worried about Gran’s safety. The police should give her some protection.”
“I’ll go to Rosemary Donovan, rather than the police in Providence. She’ll help us out.”
Tristan nodded.
“In the meantime, we need to figure out where to hide you. People must have heard the church bell ringing this afternoon, and they may have investigated that or the lightning strike. If we left anything behind—food wrappers, footprints—it’s not going to be safe for you anymore. What do you think—back to Bryan?”
“No. I know he wants to help, but the less people we involve the better.”
“Nickerson?”
“Home sweet home!” Tristan replied with a smile.
Ivy glanced in her mirror two more times, then flipped the switch to the night view as the car behind them drew closer.
“Something wrong?” Tristan asked.
“Uh, no, not anymore. He—or she—is finally passing us. What kind of car is that?” she asked as it went around them.
“A little black one,” Tristan replied, then laughed. “I’m not up on expensive sports cars.”
“I saw one just like it when we were leaving Providence.”
“There are probably a lot of them roaming the East Coast,” Tristan pointed out calmly.
“Of course,” Ivy said, but she shifted in her seat, unable to shake an uncomfortable feeling.
“Tired?”
“Yeah.” She turned off the AC, opened the window, and let the fresh air blow through the car. The road was mostly straight and flat, edged with sandy stretches of grass and scrub pine. They drove for miles in silence, then Tristan suddenly turned in his seat.
“Where’d that car come from?” he asked sharply.
“The shoulder of the road, I think. There’s no exit along here.”
“If so, he was sitting with his lights off.”
Something most people don’t do, Ivy thought. She picked up speed. A half second later, the car behind them picked up speed. Ivy slowed. The car behind them slowed. “I don’t like this.”
“The headlights are low to the road,” he observed.
“Lik
e a sports car’s.”
“Drive steady,” he said. “The other guy could be zoning out, or drunk, or simply entertaining us with a little game.”
“Or it could be Corinne’s killer.” She said it like a joke, but she was getting scared.
The car behind them began to close the gap between, creeping closer and closer. Ivy’s heart beat fast.
Suddenly the sports car accelerated, bumped the rear of Ivy’s car, then pulled back. Ivy swore. “What’s he doing?”
“Keep going!”
“Here he comes again!” Ivy exclaimed and stepped on the gas, barely escaping a second bump from behind.
“He might be trying to create an accident, just enough to make you pull over. Keep your eyes on the road and keep moving.”
Ivy tried, but it was impossible not to glance in the mirror and watch the car behind her shifting back and forth, moving dangerously close to her left side, then dangerously close to the right.
In the final stretch of road to the canal, there were no highway lights. Only the high beams of the two cars marked their path through the night. For a moment, Ivy flashed back to the night of her collision on Morris Island, when she was floating high above her wrecked car, looking down on the lights of another car racing away.
The car pursuing them jolted her out of the memory, locking on her left side, chafing the metal, then disengaging again.
“You’re a pro!” Tristan praised her, his hand lightly covering her whitened knuckles as she gripped the wheel. “One mile to Bourne Bridge,” he read. “It’s lit—and probably has security cameras. Maybe he’ll back off.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Ivy asked.
As Tristan predicted, the car hung back while crossing the bridge, but as soon as they cleared it, he was on their tail.
“Rotary coming,” Tristan warned.
“Hold on!” Ivy made a quick right off the traffic circle. The car behind them kept going.
“Well done!”
“Except I have no idea where I’m going.”
“Safety in numbers. Go wherever you see a bunch of lights.”
On a straight road now, Ivy accelerated, her eyes darting between the pavement ahead and her rearview mirror. Moments later, when she saw a car behind them picking up speed, her stomach tightened. “Someone’s back there.” She took another quick right, then hooked left. The road grew bumpy.
Tristan leaned forward. “I see a tower with a light on top. We may be headed back to the canal.”
She made another turn.
Tristan turned around in his seat. “I think we’ve lost him.”
Ivy continued along the narrow road, then began to slow. Black pines crowded the margins of the route. “This looks like a service road.”
“There are some lights ahead.”
She drove a little further. “Dead end!”
A one-story building, well lit by security lights, faced an empty parking lot. The road continued on only as an unpaved path, barely wide enough for a car. In the distance, from beyond the trees that lined the path, she heard a soft clang-clang. “A train.”
“We must be near the railroad bridge,” Tristan replied. “I bet that was the tower I saw.”
“Listen—”
They strained to hear the whining of another motor above the idle of theirs.
Suddenly a car gunned its engine. With lights off, it shot out from an entrance they hadn’t seen and came barreling down the road toward them.
Twenty-eight
“FLOOR IT!” TRISTAN SHOUTED.
They sped toward the unpaved path, then flew down it, bumping over potholes, taking a sharp curve, scraping against pine branches. Tristan saw a clearing ahead. Then he saw the train. “Stop! Stop!”
Ivy slammed on the brakes. The car that was chasing them braked as well and spun next to them, kicking up sand and dirt, coming within an inch of slamming into their car and flinging them into the train. The driver punched on his headlights, momentarily freezing the scene in halogen brightness. Tristan wrenched around and saw that they were trapped between their pursuer and the slow-moving train.
He had wedged them in. To return to the unpaved path, they would have to back up and make a three-point turn. The other option was to drive over the tracks after the train had passed. But it wasn’t a paved crossing and the tracks were high. Ivy would have to ease over them slowly in her little VW—if the car could make it at all.
“Windows up. Doors locked,” Tristan said, hoping the sports car was the pursuer’s only weapon.
The black car’s lights went out. The bridge lights, about fifty feet away, designed to warn airplanes and boats, did little to illuminate the area. Were they dealing with one or two people? Tristan wondered. The Beetle’s taillights picked up a single dark figure moving toward them.
Tristan glanced sideways at Ivy. If they had been followed from Providence, their pursuer was here for “Luke.” Tristan figured there was a way to be sure the pursuer left Ivy alone. After stealing one last look at her, lingering just a second longer, Tristan unlocked his door and got out.
“Tristan!”
“Get ready to go,” he said, closing the door, moving quickly away from the car.
“Tristan, get back in!”
He could hear her screaming at him through the glass. He moved toward the bridge, but not too fast, wanting to make sure the hooded figure followed him, allowing Ivy to escape.
“Where you going, Luke?”
At the sound of his voice, Tristan’s stomach clenched. Without stopping or glancing over his shoulder he said, “You’re acting like a jerk, Bryan.”
“Playing a little bumper cars, that’s all,” Bryan replied.
Tristan turned to face him.
“Just having some fun. You used to be more fun, Luke.”
“You’re drunk.”
“A little, but I’m careful nowadays,” Bryan replied. “I don’t let myself get out of control. Can’t—not anymore—don’t think I got nine lives, like you.”
Tristan stepped backward onto the bridge. There was a maintenance walkway and handrail on one side.
“I’ll never know how you climbed out of that ocean alive,” Bryan continued, walking toward Tristan. “I dumped you several miles out. Did some fisherman help you?”
The train had disappeared around the bend, but Ivy’s car was still there. Tristan’s heart sank when he saw a shadow separate from the car. She had climbed quietly out of it and was following Bryan. Tristan wanted to shout at her to go back, but he couldn’t give away that she was there.
Continually walking backward, he kept Bryan waiting for a response, drawing him onto the bridge. “Something like that. How’d you get me out in the boat? You shot me up with something, didn’t you?”
Ivy had stopped at the edge of the bridge. Tristan saw her look quickly toward the base of the tower, which he suspected housed the gears that raised the bridge. She looked back at him and pointed upward with her hand.
Tristan stopped and rocked slightly on his feet, trying to signal to her that he knew the entire span would rise, hoping to keep her from shouting to him.
“What do you want from me?” he asked Bryan, moving more quickly than before.
Bryan, who had kept pace with him, was now twenty feet from Tristan and a hundred feet from Ivy on the canal’s bank. “You know. The cufflink. Hand it over.”
Tristan felt a jolt and tremor in the steel bridge. “You’re talking crazy,” he said as the bridge began to rise. “I’ve never owned a cufflink in my life, and far as I know, neither have you.”
“Oh, but I have,” Bryan replied. “They were a gift from my uncle, who knows that money and opportunities come to big college stars. ‘For your sports banquets,’ he told me, ‘and when those rich businessmen take you out on the town.’”
“Tristan!” Ivy shouted.
“Stay there, Ivy!” he yelled back.
Bryan glanced over his shoulder and laughed. “Isn’t this fun? I took this ride wi
th Alicia, but she was kind of slumped over.”
“Tristan!” she cried out again.
“Who the hell is Tristan?” Bryan asked, suddenly uncertain, turning back toward Ivy as if looking for a third person. “She calling the dead guy?”
“She thinks he’s an angel,” Tristan replied.
Bryan laughed but kept his eyes on Ivy, then took a step toward her.
If Bryan had enough brains, Tristan thought, he’d figure out that he could get “Luke” to do whatever he wanted by threatening Ivy. Needing bait, Tristan dug in his pocket. “Does your cufflink have an arrow on it?”
Bryan spun around, his eyes immediately going to the glint of gold in Tristan’s hand. “A top, stupid. You gave me the nickname.”
A simple finger top, Tristan thought, studying the shape.
“You’ve called me that since we were eight,” Bryan said. “You have lost your memory. Too bad that Ivy talked you into proving your innocence.”
One thing was clear: Bryan wouldn’t end his killing spree with “Luke.” Ivy knew too much.
“When you hit that woman, you should have manned up and gone to the police.”
“I was drunk, coming home from an awards banquet. And anyway, when I left her, she was still breathing.”
“So you call an ambulance.”
“Like I’ve said a million times, you’re naïve. Yeah, they might’ve looked the other way if I was playing in the Stanley Cup, but not for me, a kid from River Gardens who hadn’t yet shown what I can do in real competition. My career would’ve been over before it started.”
“So you took your car to Tony, knowing Tony’s the loyal kind. And Corinne was there.”
“Doing her damn photoshoot. She got there early, while I was sleeping off the banquet in Tony’s house.
“I come out and see that lens pointing like a big nose into my personal business. She was always messing with other people’s things. She found the cufflink in the car.”
Tristan kept moving and kept Bryan talking, all the while drawing him away from the shore and Ivy, and trying to work out a plan in his head. “So she started blackmailing you. You must have paid her a lot—she had her own apartment.”
Everlasting Page 20
